A New Music Tool for the Choir

A New Music Tool for the Choir

The world has moved into the digital age and our youth in India has caught up in the last few years: Today, almost everybody has a smartphone and access to the internet wherever they are.

In the past years, we have been looking for a more effective way to teach our church music to the National Choir, the regional choirs and our members in all the congregations. We are very happy that finally we have found a tool which will make this very easy for everybody: Musescore is a free software to create and play digital music sheets!

Play Sheet Music: online or using the App

The digital music sheets can be played online from any computer or laptop, and they can be downloaded as pdfs for printout.

Musescore has also developed apps for users of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.

There are two versions available:

a) the free App lets you play music sheets only when there is an internet connection (wifi or data),

b) the paid App allows users to download music sheets which can be played offline – an advantage that we think is well worth its money.

NAC India on MuseScore

We think that this is an awesome tool for teaching the basics of any song that the choir wants to learn. NAC India has a Musescore account where some songs from our English Hymnal are already online. Every song is available as piano version (for practice) and as organ version (and can be played during Praise and Worship). The button below takes you to our Musescore account:

Our goal is to feed the music sheets for all the 250 songs and to make them available to all our members through the app. The song numbers on musescore represent the number in our new English Hymnal (which was released in 2014).

Using the Musescore app, NAC hymns and songs can be found by searching for “NAC India”.

Why should you download the app?

The app is an ideal tool to learn new songs from scratch, to get familiar with a new voice, or to prepare for choir practices. There are some powerful settings which are worth exploring:

Press the gear icon to enter the Settings where you can adjust the playback tempo of the song.

Adjust the Note Size to see either the complete song, or zoom right into a particular measure that you want to study.

Use the Part Mixer to play all the parts (ex. SATB) at once, a solo for one part (ex. Alto), or any combination of parts. Additionally, the volume of each part can be adjusted, ex. Tenor loudest and the other three in a lower volume. Lastly, you can choose to view only the notes of one part, ex. Bass, and you can choose to play it as solo or with the other parts while their notes are hidden.

This tool will be essential in learning songs, no matter in which language you sing. The lyrics are given in English, but the tunes can be learned and sung in any language!

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